Improving the study of brain-behavior relationships

I figured this might be a good addition to the recent discussion of the mind-body problem. It makes concrete our current understanding of the nature of behavior as an emergent property of a highly variable, dynamical, degenerate system.

> In this paper, we review three questionable assumptions whose reconsideration may offer opportunities for a more robust and replicable science:

> (1) The localization assumption: the instances that constitute a category of psychological events (e.g., instances of fear) are assumed to be caused by a single, dedicated psychological process implemented in a dedicated neural ensemble (see Glossary).

> (2) The one-to-one assumption: the dedicated neural ensemble is assumed to map uniquely to that psychological category, such that the mapping generalizes across contexts, people, measurement strategies, and experimental designs.

> (3) The independence assumption: the dedicated neural ensemble is thought to function independently of contextual factors, such as the rest of the brain, the body, and the surrounding world, so the ensemble can be studied alone without concern for those other factors. Contextual factors might moderate activity in the neural ensemble but should not fundamentally change its mapping to the instances of a psychological category.